the lower body 319Colloquial (ৢষ䇁). Here, too, Shen’s vigor leads to little more than
unproven assertions, not of the original or stimulating kind.^14
Shen’s first individual collection of poetry, A Handful of Tit (ϔᡞད
ч, 2001), is a garish, professional-looking unofficial publication. Its
material quality reflects the fact that Shen makes a living in the pub-
lishing business as one of the many book brokers operating in newly
graphomanic China, to borrow Geremie Barmé’s term.^15 Shen’s sec-
ond collection, Great Evil Hidden in the Heart (ᖗ㮣ᙊ), banned almost
immediately after its (official) publication in 2004, suggests macho
sexuality through the cover photograph of a man’s bare abdomen ris-
ing from a pair of jeans, his crotch at the center of the picture.^16 In a
preface to A Handful called “My Poetry Makes Sense” (៥ⱘ䆫℠᳝䘧
⧚), Shen claims that foreign sinologists will never understand poetry
like his and neither will most Chinese critics, because they only have
access to learned, intellectual, formal types of language and cannot get
at the nuances of the spoken word.
It is difficult to determine the limits of one’s own perception, and I
am aware that the native and non-native experience of any poetry is
likely to differ substantially—although generalization of this issue dis-
regards the individual reader’s engagement with the literary text that
is essential to its realization. At any rate, I would wager my dictionaries
that foreign readers are not as powerless as Shen makes them out to
be. On the contrary, Lower Body poetry is easier for foreign readers
and translators than most other avant-garde texts. This is because of
its one-dimensionality or, in a related image, its textual shallowness;
and because of its loose composition on the levels of word, phrase
and sentence, which make the translator less obliged than usual to be
“faithful to the original” in the narrow sense. Both Yin Lichuan and
Shen Haobo have stated that they are less concerned with translatory
word-to-word meticulousness than with getting across the “meaning”
or the “intention” or indeed the “gist” (ᛣᗱ) of their work.^17 One
surmises that this attitude also holds for their poetry’s domestic travels,
so to speak, and that critical misapprehensions of Lower Body po-
etry are to do with the incompatibility of the poet’s and the critic’s
(^14) Shen Haobo 1999. The invention of the term is generally ascribed to Yi Sha
(e.g. Luo Zhenya 2005: 212).
(^15) Barmé 1999: x.
(^16) Shen Haobo 2001a and 2004.
(^17) Personal communication on several occasions in 2001-2003.